09 February 2013

The United
Kingdom is rivaled by no other country as a continuous major power since the
rise of the nation-state, but it is now slipping into a crisis of national
purpose as serious as it passed through prior to the Thatcher years (1979–90).
By the late 1970s, Britain had an unruly industrial-relations climate, was
lumbered by a vast and hemorrhagingly unprofitable public sector, had a 98
percent top personal-income-tax rate, and was in danger of becoming a silly and
backward place. Thatcher tamed the labor unions, radically reduced taxes,
privatized almost everything, gave the Argentinians a good thrashing over the
Falklands (restoring democracy to Argentina in the process, though it hasn’t
worked very well), and played a front-rank role, with Ronald Reagan and Pope
John Paul II, in the Western victory in the Cold War. Britain was restored to
the place she has generally occupied since early Henrician times as one of the
world’s most respected nations.

Much, though not all, of this has been squandered by Margaret
Thatcher’s successors. John Major kept most of her accomplishments in
place and won a fourth straight full-term majority for the Conservatives
(the first a party has had since before the first Reform Act of 1832,
which expanded the electorate). Then came Tony Blair and New Labour.
Gradually, almost all taxes except those on individual and personal
incomes were raised, and finally those were, too. The proceeds were
poured into the public service, while, in a pattern familiar to
Americans, standards of state education and public health care declined.
What was new about Labour was that, for the first time, it was
reelected to consecutive full terms (three terms), before being rejected
under Blair’s successor, the long-serving chancellor of the exchequer,
Gordon Brown, in 2011. No previous Labour government had lasted more
than six years (Ramsay Macdonald, 1929–35; Clement Attlee, 1945–51;
Harold Wilson, 1964–70; Wilson and James Callaghan, 1974–79). These 23
years in power were all that Labour had to show for the 73 years it had
been the alternate party of government with the Conservatives prior to
the election of Tony Blair in 1997, and four of the Macdonald years were
in a rickety coalition dominated by the Conservatives and sponsored by a
royal request from King George V.

It was an achievement for Labour to be consecutively returned to
office three times, but it now appears to have been a testimony more to
the immense success of the Thatcher-Major years that required a long
time to squander, than to any masterly aptitude at governance by Labour.
Blair was, as he remains, an amiable man and a reliable ally (as were
Attlee, Wilson, and Callaghan), but by retaining Thatcher’s discipline
of the unions and avoiding the traditional Labour addiction to punitive
income-tax increases, he avoided being jettisoned on the customary fast
track after four or five years of socialist nostrums. But old, far-left
Labour replaced Brown after all parties lost in the election of 2011.
The public was not sufficiently impressed with the Conservatives under
David Cameron to give them a majority, and engaged in the rare
self-indulgence of a large vote to the Liberal Democrats, who last were
in government in peacetime in Macdonald’s ineffectual regime, and last
led a government themselves under David Lloyd George in the piping days
of Woodrow Wilson and Warren Gamaliel Harding. The country has its first
peacetime coalition in over 75 years.

By imposition of a pantomime horse of austerity and stimulus, where
the Conservative front and Lib-Dem back legs aren’t synchronized, the
government has generated no economic growth and has suffered all of the
standard erosion of popularity that afflicts governments trying to fight
off a stagflationary recession. The aberrant support for the third
party has collapsed, and the Liberal Democrats are barely holding their
own against the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), led by the
country’s most persuasive and articulate party leader, Nigel Farage. The
UKIP advanced initially in outspoken opposition to Euro-integration,
but is also a skillful populist articulation of middle-class values. And
in current polls, Europe — though the British are unhappy with it and
have long since given up on the Euro-federalist dream, which, at its
most florid, predicted the return of preeminent world influence to the
nations of the old continent standing on each other’s shoulders — ranked
as a concern behind the economy, the welfare system, immigration, the
deficit, and the National Health Service.

These polls show that only 22 percent of the British are positive
about Europe, 19 percent are negative but wish to renegotiate some sort
of membership, though not a federal or centralized one, and 26 percent
are negative and want out altogether. Prime Minister Cameron personally
has a 28 percent approval rating, an equal 28 percent don’t approve of
him but don’t prefer the vintage Labour leader Ed Miliband (who has
ditched any pretense to New Labour), and another 28 percent disapprove
of Cameron so thoroughly that they do prefer Miliband. Overall, Labour
leads the Conservatives 38 percent to 33 percent and the Liberal
Democrats and the UKIP are both around 10 percent. But almost all the
UKIP votes come from the Conservatives, and they are spread fairly
evenly throughout the country.

Despite his problems, which were aggravated by his proximity to the
much-mistrusted Rupert Murdoch organization in the hacking scandal last
year, Cameron still leads on the major issue of the economy, 43 to 26
percent, and on the third issue, immigration, and on Europe. His
standing on that last question has been reinforced by a promise of an
in-or-out referendum in 2017. This was the best he could do, as his
coalition partners would desert him if he tried such a referendum now.
If Britain were to lurch into the arms of Labour at the next election,
it would follow the Gadarene route to immolation as a serious force that
France is now charging down under its new socialist president, François
Hollande.

Cameron is trying to redress the errors of Blair and Brown,
without recalling what are still popularly seen as the “uncaring”
severity and excessive traditionalism of Thatcher. But the underlying
strategic difficulty the United Kingdom faces is that the pre-Thatcher
Conservatives under Harold Macmillan and Edward Heath (prime ministers
1957–63 and 1970–74 respectively) plunged headlong into Europe and
ditched their long and very useful relationship with Britain’s senior
associate states in the Commonwealth: Canada, Australia, India,
Singapore, and New Zealand, which have all done much better than Europe
in most of the intervening years, and are united with Britain in
language, institutions, and a democratic inheritance (from Britain
herself). Thatcher thought better of that and placed all her bets on the
American alliance with Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. It worked,
but it didn’t last. Obama has no interest in the special relationship,
or what was called in the days of Churchill and Roosevelt, with reason,
the Grand Alliance, and Britain is an orphan: no special ally, no
coterie of kindred and flourishing states, and no room to grow in the
European inn.

In their long and illustrious history, the British have met sterner
challenges. But they will need a majority government with a clear
mandate and a stronger leader than Cameron has appeared to be. The
likeliest bet now is that if he falters, the folkloric star mayor of
London, Boris Johnson, will get the call from the Conservatives, who
have sacked virtually all of their leaders since the voluntary
retirement of Stanley Baldwin in 1937. (Even Winston Churchill was eased
out at 80, and Margaret Thatcher was pushed out for predicting exactly
what has happened in Europe.) Whether or not Cameron stays, he will
probably have to dump the Liberal Democrats as he dissolves Parliament
for elections in two years, in favor of an arrangement with Farage. In
such times, great statesmen of the past such as Walpole, the Pitts elder
and younger, Fox, Palmerston, Russell, Disraeli, Gladstone, and Lloyd
George flourished. As in most other countries, the current crop, except
perhaps for Farage, does not appear to be cut from the same cloth.
Britain always muddles through, but it’s dodgy.

— Conrad Black is the author ofFranklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom, Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full, and the recently publishedA Matter of Principle. He can be reached at cbletters@gmail.com.

Seems like only yesterday that Eric Holder was inveighing against sweeping executive war powers. These were the Bush years, when Holder could readily be foundcaviling
about such odious practices as “secret electronic surveillance against
American citizens” and “detain[ing] American citizens without due
process of law.” Back then, Holder declared these Bush war crimes so
“needlessly abusive and unlawful” that the American people (translation:
the Bush-deranged Left) were owed “a reckoning” against the officials
who conjured them up.

But once he became attorney general in a Democratic administration,
the ever-malleable Mr. Holder decided there was actually no problem killing American citizens without due process of law, based on intelligence gleaned from secret surveillance.

The breathtaking hypocrisy of the Obama Democrats is what screams off the pages of the “white paper”
Holder’s Justice Department has served up to support the president’s
use of lethal force against U.S. nationals who align with our foreign
terrorist enemies. It bears remembering that Holder, like his Gitmo Bar
soul mates, once volunteered his services to the enemy. At the time, he was a senior partner at a firm that was
among the Lawyer Left’s most eager to provide free legal help to
al-Qaeda enemy combatants in their lawsuits against the American people.
Holder filed an amicus brief on behalf of Jose Padilla, an American
citizen turned al-Qaeda operative who was sent to the United States by
Khalid Sheikh Mohamed in 2002 to attempt a post-9/11 “second wave” of
mass-murder attacks.

Just so you get the gist of where Holder was coming from, an
amicus (or “friend of the court”) brief is not something a lawyer has to
file on behalf of a client. Padilla already had other counsel. Holder
was a party crasher, gratuitously intervening — exploiting his status as
a former Clinton deputy attorney general — to steer the court toward
his desired policy.

And that desired policy? Holder wanted terrorism relegated to the
criminal-justice system, as it had been before Bush pivoted to a
law-of-war paradigm. According to the pre-2009 Holder, if an
enemy-combatant terrorist, particularly an American citizen, is
encountered away from a traditional battlefield, the Constitution
demands that he be given the rights of a criminal defendant. Executive
action against him may be taken only under judicial supervision. Yes,
Holder conceded, this might mean that the government will be barred from
detaining and interrogating many a “dangerous terrorist.” And yes, it
risks the reprise of 9/11’s slaughter of nearly 3,000 Americans. “But,”
he blithely concluded,
“our Nation has always been prepared to accept some risk as the price
of guaranteeing that the Executive does not have arbitrary power to
imprison citizens.”

Ah, but arbitrary power to kill citizens — now, that’s a different story.

We could go on all day about chutzpah. Holder and Obama used to sneer
that Bush/Cheney counterterrorism posed a “false choice” between our
security and “our values.” Now, they’ve decided not only that the
commander-in-chief’s war powers extend beyond “hot battlefields” to
anyplace on the planet the president chooses, but also that the last
thing we need is judicial oversight. After all, the white paper
declaims, “matters intimately related to foreign policy and national
security are rarely proper subjects for judicial intervention” and “turn
on standards that defy judicial application.”

Who knew? Indeed, who knew that Clarence Thomas — Clarence Thomas — had become Obama’s favorite Supreme Court justice? The Left used to point out gleefully that, in the critical 2004 Hamdi case,
which reaffirmed that American-citizen enemy combatants may be detained
without civilian due process, none of the other eight justices agreed
with Thomas’sembrace
of the Bush administration’s expansive take on executive war power.
Now, Obama and Holder extensively quote Justice Thomas — as if the Left
hadn’t spent eight years smearing him and Bush and every
national-security conservative as a Constitution-shredding monster.

It is tempting to dwell on Obama’s political posturing, on the
fraud that runs through everything from Left’s condemnation of
waterboarding to its precious fretting over Bush’s Gitmo “gulag” — as
opposed to the Obama graveyard. To linger on the hypocrisy, however, is
to miss the big picture. That requires us to look at three things.

The first is that, on the central question, the administration is
right: The commander-in-chief does have the power in wartime to use
lethal force against American citizens who join with the enemy, and
there is no judicial recourse. The Obama/Holder blather about “false
choices” was absurd, because no choice is involved at all: “Our values”
are reflected in the Constitution, which calls for due process under the prevailing circumstances, not judicial
process under all circumstances. When hostilities rage, “our values”
include the laws of war. Under them, enemy combatants may lawfully be
killed, captured, and detained without trial, or tried by military
commission.

That goes for American enemy combatants, too — continued
foot-stamping to the contrary from progressives and libertarians
notwithstanding. The Supreme Court has repeatedly
ruled that American citizens who fight for the enemy may be treated
like the enemy. Ever notice that the people forever insisting on
judicial interventions are the first to ignore the courts when the
rulings go against them?

The second big-picture issue is the substance of the Obama
guidelines. Despite proceeding from a sound premise, the Justice
Department white paper is dangerously misguided. Ironically, this is
mostly because the administration is guilty of exactly the error the
Left accused President Bush of, often unfairly: an executive imperialism
that fails to respect Congress’s war powers and to seek legislative
buy-in.

No credible person questions the following two propositions: (1) The
president has not only the authority but the obligation to use any force
necessary to repel attacks or prevent truly imminent attacks; and (2)
when combat operations are authorized by Congress, which is endowed with
the constitutional power to declare war, the president may use any
force he judges necessary within the parameters of Congress’s
authorization. In those two situations, if American citizens are killed
while fighting for the enemy, there is no constitutional violation.

Nevertheless, outside these two situations, presidents can veer into
lawlessness. Executive war-making is on thin ice, at best, if it exceeds
Congress’s combat authorization (or if Congress has not given
authorization), and if the United States is not otherwise under either
attack or the imminent threat of attack. The Obama guidelines are
heedless of these limitations.

The white paper suggests that, independent of congressional
authorization, the president has some amorphous reservoir of authority —
created by a combination of his general Article II powers and
international law (particularly the latter’s recognition of a
self-defense right) — to instigate military operations on his own. The
administration would comfort us regarding this imperious claim by
purporting to limit it to “imminent” attack situations, and stipulating
that lethal force should be used against Americans only when capture is
“infeasible.” But the guidelines provide Orwellian definitions of imminence and feasibility — such that these are not really limitations at all.

What emerges instead, at least in theory, is an unbound, unreviewable
license to kill any American the commander-in-chief, acting through some
unspecified subordinate, decides is dangerous.

Let’s try to be more concrete about it by considering a hypothetical
based on the Libya war. Obama launched that war unilaterally: There was
no congressional authorization, no threat of attack against the United
States, and no vital American interest imperiled. Let’s say the
president or, even worse, some unidentified subordinate decided some
American mercenary in, say, northern Chad (a non-battlefield) was
training non-uniformed forces to conduct covert operations in support of
Qaddafi. The administration appears to take the position that the
president or his mysterious subordinate could legitimately dispatch a
drone to kill that American citizen.

This is plain wrong. That the Constitution, as construed by the
Supreme Court, abides the wartime killing of American enemy combatants
is not a bright green light. It is a reluctant allowance, a grudging
resolution of a very close question. The Constitution remains,
primarily, every American citizen’s protection against federal-government abuse.
Foreign enemies threaten all Americans, and thus wide latitude must be
granted to the governmental forces charged with defeating them. If this
ends up meaning a citizen’s right to life must be denied because he
threatens other American lives, the killing must be done consistent with
the Constitution’s requirements. In the absence of an attack or
imminent attack, that means there must be a congressional authorization.
Consulting with the Security Council or the Arab League will not do.

The ongoing war against al-Qaeda and its affiliates is legitimate
under the Authorization of the Use of Military Force passed by Congress
in the aftermath of 9/11. But the 2001 AUMF is not the showstopper it is portrayed to be by the white paper, by
administration supporters, and by the national-security Right. As I’ve
argued before (see, e.g.,here), it is badly in need of updating.

To be sure, the AUMF is sweeping in terms of allowing the president
to target “nations, organizations or persons” without any geographical
limitations — Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen and Jose Padilla in Chicago were
no less eligible for enemy-combatant treatment than Yasser Hamdi in
Afghanistan. Yet the AUMF is narrower than commonly thought, and surely
narrower than the Obama white paper intimates. That is because, to
qualify as enemy combatants, the AUMF requires that these nations,
organizations, or persons must either have been complicit in the 9/11
attacks or have harbored those who were complicit.

September 11, 2001, was a dozen years ago. Many jihadists
who now threaten us did not join al-Qaeda and its affiliates until years
after the attacks. In fact, some affiliates, such as the Pakistani
Taliban, did not even exist on 9/11. To be sure, the AUMF went on to say
that the reason Congress was authorizing combat operations was “to
prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United
States by such nations, organizations or persons.” But that clause did
not unmoor what is otherwise the AUMF’s literal grounding in 9/11.
Certainly, the fuzzy “future attacks” language is a thin reed on which
to rest the use of lethal force against Americans — or anyone else — who
had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, even if they are jihadist
savages. I doubt many Republicans would have much use for judges who
construed the Constitution with the same organic grandeur that colors
the standard Republican reading of the AUMF.

This brings us, finally, to the last big-picture point: There is
abundant opportunity in Obama’s hypocrisy. For a dozen years, we have
engaged in heated debates about Bush counterterrorism practices. After
four years of watching Obama enthusiastically adopt what he once
condemned, we now know Bush detractors were animated by politics, not
conviction. We now know that, across a broad spectrum of Obama
progressives and national-security conservatives, there is consensus
about an aggressive counterterrorism model.

Though neither the civilian nor the military justice system is a
comfortable fit for modern international terrorism, we have wasted years
slamming the square peg into these round holes. Instead, we should have
been designing a new, hybrid legal framework for the modern realities
of international terrorism: the need to detain jihadists who cannot be
tried under civilian due-process standards; the need effectively to
interrogate jihadist prisoners to whom Geneva Convention protections for
honorable combatants do not apply; the need to conduct searching,
rapid-fire cross-border surveillance; the need to capture and sometimes
kill enemy operatives who lurk in the shadows, far from traditional
battlefields — some of whom will inevitably be American citizens; the
need to revise the AUMF to reflect the current state of the war and
remove uncertainty — or illegitimacy — in the determination of who
qualifies as an enemy combatant.

For many years, I have argued
that we need a new national-security court to deal with the unique
legal challenges of a war against transnational terrorists. If anything,
the need is more urgent now than ever. No matter what the future of
counterterrorism is, though, there needs to be congressional buy-in.
President Bush could never deliver that: Democrats were too determined
to smear for political purposes the strategies they abruptly embraced
once they were accountable for the nation’s security. But President
Obama could do it — he could deliver plenty of Democrats. Together with
the strong Republican support that is guaranteed, we could very quickly
have an enduring, constitutionally sound counterterrorism framework. We
could craft legislation that provides broad executive discretion but
avoids the dangerous excesses of the Justice Department white paper.

All President Obama has to do is lead. All he has to have, in dealing
publicly with his anti-war, anti-anti-terrorist base, is the courage of
the convictions he and his attorney general manage to summon up for
secret white papers.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the executive director of the Philadelphia Freedom Center. He is the author, most recently, of Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy, which is published by Encounter Books.

The Department of Homeland Security’s civil rights
watchdog has concluded that travelers along the nation’s borders may
have their electronics seized and the contents of those devices examined
for any reason whatsoever — all in the name of national security.

The DHS, which secures the nation’s border, in 2009 announced that it
would conduct a “Civil Liberties Impact Assessment” of its
suspicionless search-and-seizure policy pertaining to electronic devices
“within 120 days.”
More than three years later, the DHS office of Civil Rights and Civil
Liberties published a two-page executive summary of its findings.

“We also conclude that imposing a requirement that officers have
reasonable suspicion in order to conduct a border search of an
electronic device would be operationally harmful without concomitant
civil rights/civil liberties benefits,” the executive summary said.

The memo highlights the friction between today’s reality that
electronic devices have become virtual extensions of ourselves housing
everything from e-mail to instant-message chats to photos and our papers
and effects — juxtaposed against the government’s stated quest for
national security.

The President George W. Bush administration first announced the
suspicionless, electronics search rules in 2008. The President Barack
Obama administration followed up with virtually the same rules a year
later. Between 2008 and 2010, 6,500 persons had their electronic devices searched along the U.S. border, according to DHS data.

According to legal precedent, the Fourth Amendment — the right to be
free from unreasonable searches and seizures — does not apply along the
border. By the way, the government contends the Fourth-Amendment-Free
Zone stretches 100milesinland from the nation’s actual border.

Civil rights groups like the American Civil Liberties Union suggest
that “reasonable suspicion” should be the rule, at a minimum, despite
that being a lower standard than required by the Fourth Amendment.

“There should be a reasonable,
articulate reason why the search of our electronic devices could lead to
evidence of a crime,” Catherine Crump, an ACLU staff attorney, said in a
telephone interview. “That’s a low threshold.”

The DHS watchdog’s conclusion isn’t surprising, as the DHS is taking
that position in litigation in which the ACLU is challenging the
suspicionless, electronic-device searches and seizures along the
nation’s borders. But that conclusion nevertheless is alarming
considering it came from the DHS civil rights watchdog, which maintains
its mission is “promoting respect for civil rights and civil liberties.”

“This is a civil liberties watchdog office. If it is doing its job
property, it is supposed to objectively evaluate. It has the power to
recommend safeguards to safeguard Americans’ rights,” Crump said.

“The
office has not done that and the public has the right to know why.”

Meantime, a lawsuit the ACLU brought on the issue concerns a New York
man whose laptop was seized along the Canadian border in 2010 and
returned 11 days later after his attorney complained.

At an Amtrak inspection point, Pascal Abidor showed his U.S. passport
to a federal agent. He was ordered to move to the cafe car, where they
removed his laptop from his luggage and “ordered Mr. Abidor to enter his password,” according to the lawsuit.

Agents asked him about pictures they found on his laptop, which
included Hamas and Hezbollah rallies. He explained that he was earning a
doctoral degree at a Canadian university on the topic of the modern
history of Shiites in Lebanon.

He was handcuffed and then jailed for three hours while the
authorities looked through his computer while numerous agents questioned
him, according to the suit, which is pending in New York federal court.

08 February 2013

A would-be Islamic terrorist tried to ignite a civil war this morning by bombing a bank in Oakland, California, saying that “he wanted the
bank bombing to be blamed on anti-U.S. government militias”; luckily,
the FBI thwarted his plan:

A man who washoping
to start a civil war in the United States with a terrorist attack in the Bay
Area was arrested early Friday after trying to detonate what he thought was a
car bomb at a Bank of America branch in Oakland, federal prosecutors
said.

Matthew Aaron
Llaneza, 28, of San Jose was taken into custody near the bank at 303
Hegenberger Road after pressing a cell-phone trigger device that was supposed
to detonate the explosives inside an SUV and bring down the building,
prosecutors said.

His supposed
accomplice was an undercover FBI agent who had been meeting with him since Nov.
30, according to an FBI declaration filed in federal court. The declaration
said the FBI had built the purported bomb, which posed no threat to the public.

The FBI agent quoted
Llaneza as saying he supports the Taliban and wants to engage in violent jihad.

In the Nov. 30 meeting with an agent who posed as someone connected to the
Taliban in Afghanistan, Llaneza said he wanted the bank bombing to be blamed on
anti-U.S. government militias, triggering a government crackdown, a right-wing
response and a civil war, the FBI declaration said….

[Llaneza] laughed and hugged the undercover agent after the agent showed him
the SUV in a storage unit rented by the FBI. Llaneza also stated he wanted to
travel to Afghanistan so he could train Taliban fighters, according to
authorities.

He's identified as a white male on his booking sheet.

Here is the official FBI press release about the incident, released a few minutes ago: